A Review of Fady Joudah’s […] — April 1, 2024 by Christopher Nelson
Milkweed Editions has published a new collection of poems by Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet and doctor. Its title is […]—ellipsis and suspension points, omission and uncertainty, a fitting gesture for a book published during an active genocide by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people. That context makes the pathos of this work all the more urgent and despairing. In the opening poem Joudah says, “I write for the future // because my present is demolished.” It is a straightforward, heartbreaking declarative that sets the tone for the pages to come.
Joudah, it should be acknowledged, has lost many family members to the genocide, so, of course, in these poems we find ourselves in disorienting terrain. At times overtly political, at times disturbingly psychological, […] is about the genocide, to be sure, but it is more accurate to say the book is about the interiority of one close to the genocide. And in this way, […] embodies of one of poetry’s powers: to place us not only inside of events but inside the mind experiencing those events: not just the kernel but the germ inside the kernel. And Joudah’s mindscape is haunted and symbolically rich. Fish, for example, appear several times, symbolizing, arguably, the fragile bounty of the world. In one poem, miraculously, children rescue from the rubble of their bombed home their fish in an unshattered glass bowl. In another poem, Joudah describes a childhood game called the Fisherman, in which a tower of cans is repeatedly built and destroyed—akin to a fisherman spearing a school of fish: scatter and consolidate, plunder and repair. Here is a third example in its entirety, a short poem titled “[…],” as most of them are:
Aggressors also grieve.
What hell a lucky life can be.
I tried but couldn’t
catch fish in a mirage,
headed straight to the sea.
The sea fished out like a land.
My other half-lives
did not set me free. The mirage
of the solid self in ruins,
gigantic in departure. And the waves
of the sea growing serene whisper
what they used to scream:
I am not your translator.
You can’t catch fish in a mirage—an evocative maxim, and it isn’t even the major point of the poem. Such jewels of thinking are found throughout […], but it is a book that forces us to look at the wreckage of a world with contradictory, if not vanished, ethics.
However you respond to the genocide, you probably feel an impotent and largely private outrage. “Wandering the carnage you authorized or protested,” Joudah writes, reminding that death, destruction, and dehumanization are happening regardless of our orientation to it. But […] in no way reinforces apathy; it challenges the desensitization most of us live in, bubble-like and inured—a psychological defense, certainly, against the horrors of the world. Despite the carnage these poems are witness to, what one marvels at is their restraint. Evident in their mood is a deep understanding of the catastrophic decades Palestinians have faced. The present horrors are not new; only the scale of the horrors are. Joudah continues, “I have watched vultures before. Their committees over carcasses they did not kill. Daily the vultures are mute.”
My emphasizing genocide, however, risks mischaracterizing […], which is also a book of love. Fingers on the beloved’s earlobes, lovers swimming in the sea, snails elongating out of their shells to mate—somehow these quieter moments of affection and beauty are as powerful as the horror and destruction in other poems. That Joudah chose to include love beside war illustrates his unflagging humanity, an admirable aesthetic captured by these lines: “Life says: I will make you to make love. / Love says: I make life so that I am.” A simple want accrues in these poems: that Palestinians be regarded with humanity.
There is dissonance, however, in reading a book that begins in war yet hovers, midway through, placidly in meditations like “Ode to an Onion” and “Maqam for Apricot.” Perhaps that is a reflection of how war and human darkness often play out: on the stage of love and with the people dearest to us. That contrast seems to ask, Is it possible to find joy in times and places destroyed? Maybe joy gets redefined, as suggested in the brilliant long poem “I Seem As If I Am: Ten Maqams”: “What is joy? I was told it can be a family / that held on to their father’s corpse against the flood / so it wouldn’t wash away.”
The book’s penultimate piece is a nearly three-page prose poem called “Dedication,” which is a harrowing list of people and things that, in their vanishing or heroic endurance, comprise the atmosphere of the whole: “To the children who played in the craters the bombs made”; “To those who were killed because they refused to leave their homes to live in tents. To those who were killed on their way to the tents. To those who were killed in their tents with the cats they sheltered”; etc., and, sadly, “To those who will be killed on the first day after the war ends.”
[…] is a rare book because its contents intersect, in real time, with an event of historic significance. To use a term from rhetoric, the book has kairos; that is to say, the timing of the writing—its confluence with present reality—electrifies it. For that reason alone, […] demands to be experienced now. For his artistic mastery and insistent humanity, however, Joudah will be a poet read beyond our time.
